Johnny Jones: "I'm in love with you, and I want to marry you."
Carol Fisher: "I'm in love with you, and I want to marry you."
Johnny Jones: "Hmm... that cuts down our love scene quite a bit, doesn't it?"
Classic espionage thriller, released in 1940. It was directed by
Alfred Hitchcock and written by a host of mostly-
uncredited screenwriters and
dialogue punchers, including
Robert Benchley,
Charles Bennett,
Harold Clurman,
Joan Harrison,
Ben Hecht,
James Hilton,
John Howard Lawson,
John Lee Mahin,
Richard Maibaum, and
Budd Schulberg.
The
film starred
George Sanders,
Joel McCrea,
Laraine Day,
Herbert Marshall,
Albert Bassermann,
Robert Benchley,
Edmund Gwenn,
Eduardo Ciannelli, and
Ian Wolfe.
McCrea plays Johnny Jones, a
reporter for a
New York newspaper, who is assigned to be the paper's foreign correspondent in
Europe. While on the way to
interview a
Dutch statesman, he witnesses the man's
assassination and must go on the run from a
Nazi spy ring.
This was fairly early in Hitchcock's run, but it features some
excellent and
suspenseful set pieces, including a chase through a sea of
umbrellas, a
cat-and-mouse game inside a Dutch
windmill, the
tense scene in the
cathedral tower, and a thrilling
plane crash, shot from inside the plane. The acting is also quite good: McCrea's
cynical reporter, Bassermann's
weary diplomat, Gwenn's
cheery assassin -- and Sanders even gets to play a rare
sympathetic role! The only sour note is the
ham-handedly
gung-ho patriotic speech at the end -- but that's not reason enough for missing out on this movie, so start pestering your local video store for it today!
"Foreign Correspondent" was nominated for a number of
Academy Awards, including
Best Picture,
Best Writing: Original Screenplay,
Best Supporting Actor for Basserman,
Best Art Direction,
Best Cinematography, and
Best Special Effects.
Research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)